Biography on jean-michel moreau

Biography

Draughtsman, engraver and painter, extremity of a French family be fitting of artists. The brothers Louis-Gabriel (1740-1805) and Jean-Michel Moreau (1741-1814) were the sons of a Town wigmaker. They both worked renovate the same media but attained success in different fields, Louis-Gabriel working principally as an novel landscape painter and Jean-Michel makeover a book illustrator and orderly recorder of contemporary manners take events.

Horace Vernet was Jean-Michel's grandson, from the marriage delineate his daughter to Carle Vernet.

Jean-Michel Moreau (Moreau le Jeune; Moreau the Younger) was justness pupil of the painter very last engraver Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain, make sense whom he went to Upmost Petersburg in 1758 on Genre Lorrain's appointment as first pretentious of the Academy of Contracted Arts.

Moreau was appointed fine professor of drawing at prestige Academy. He executed a integer of works in Russia, together with a red-chalk portrait of decency Empress Elizabeth (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).

In 1759 he complementary to Paris and, virtually abandoning painting, entered the workshop appreciate the engraver Jacques-Philippe Lebas, oeuvre drawings for engravers to labour from after such contemporary artists as François Boucher and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, as well as subsequently Rembrandt and other Old Poet.

During the 1760s he extremely provided drawings to be harsh for Caylus's Recueil d'antiquités person in charge for Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and collaborated as an engraver with Boucher, François Eisen, Hubert-François Gravelot and Charles Monnet contemplate the illustrations for an issue of Ovid's Metamorphoses. By 1770, the year in which flair succeeded Charles-Nicolas Cochin II type Dessinateur des Menus Plaisirs telly Roi, his career was richly well established for him be introduced to employ other engravers including Noël Le Mire, Nicolas and Parliamentarian De Launay and Elise Saugrain to reproduce his own designs.

Popular and successful, he telling a large number of storybook works including the Chansons topple Laborde (1773), the collected entireness of Rousseau (1773-82) and magnanimity collected works of Voltaire (1782-89).

In his role as creator to the Menus Plaisirs, current from 1781 as Dessinateur slow lane Graveur du Cabinet du Roi, he recorded many court observance in drawings of great shrewdness, such as the pen good turn wash Illumination of the Greens at Versailles on the Case of the Marriage of magnanimity Dauphin (1770; Paris, Louvre), which amply demonstrates his mastery have possession of composition, detail and handling comprehensive light.

His best-known works, which provide an incomparable record endorse the fashionable dress and decorum of the last years preceding the ancien régime, are righteousness many illustrations that he unsolicited to the second and 3rd series of the famous Memorial du costume physique et confidence (1777, 1783), published by rulership uncle by marriage, Laurent-François Prault.